Home
> Authors > Electronic Voting: No Clear Verdict
Electronic Voting: No Clear Verdict
By
Shannon Snow
November 9, 2004
When asked about the most common complaints filed with California’s
Secretary of State during the previous election, spokeswoman
Carol Dahmen’s answer was anything but alarming.
“We got a lot of calls about long lines,” said Dahmen. “They
were close to running out of ballots in a few places.”
She paused to review her files. “Most people call
to find out where they should vote,” she said.
But the concern capturing statewide and national attention – the
legitimacy of electronic voting – didn’t even make
the top three.
“We had fairly few glitches,” Dahmen said.
While California’s ballot measures and political races
have all been decided, no clear verdict has emerged for electronic
voting. State officials say the election proceeded smoothly,
but critics tell a different story.
Some observers blame the long lines on Election Day to electronic
voting machines. Polling places offered fewer voting stations
than in the past, in part because they were equipped with fewer
machine stations than they had with traditional ballot booths.
Lack of a paper receipt to verify the vote was another cause
of anxiety for voters. Concern over this issued caused
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to approve a measure requiring all
voting machines in California to produce a paper trail by 2006. This
year, Nevada was the only state to offer electronic ballots with
a receipt.
Fears about California’s move to touch-screen voting machines
dominated the post-election discussion in some circles.
On the online forum Slashdot.org – which calls itself
a Web site for nerds – electronic voting was the subject
of spirited and often sarcastic debate.
“I cannot begin to understand why state officials thought
buying products with no voting trail was a good idea,” wrote
one poster on Slashdot, which gets about a quarter of a million
hits a day, mainly from members of the computer industry.
Participants in the online forum also made repeated jabs at
the lack of security of the electronic voting systems.
The skepticism of the Slashdot community raises the question:
do nerds know something we don’t?
Alan Dechert, a software engineer and founder of the Open Voting
Consortium, says yes. For the past four years, Dechert
and a slew of industry professionals and computer science professors
have been working to convince lawmakers to increase the security
of e-voting.
Dechart said that election officials “have no idea what
kind of tricks can be played.”
The OVC advocates that the software which runs electronic voting
machines be open sourced – a process of making computer
code public that has helped improve programs such as Linux.
A week before the election, five makers of electronic voting
machines submitted their code to federal officials at the National
Software Reference Library, a move that some analysts say
is a step towards opening up the code.
Others say that handover was not enough.
With elections on the line and millions at stake even for local
measures, the incentive to cheat is too high not to take all
security precautions, according to Dechert.
To corrupt online voters, he said, “The conspiracy you need
is a lot smaller,” said Dechert. All it takes
is “one person in the right place.”
Contact Shannon Snow at ssnow@stanford.edu
